george w bush

Chris Knight's avatar

So the House Republican Conference has just started up a new website dedicated to helping “the public and the press keep track of the billions of taxpayer dollars spent each year on government projects”.

Who the hell do these people think they’re kidding?

WHERE was this kind of concern from the Republicans about “billions of taxpayer dollars” between the years 2001 and early 2009, when they had the White House and for most of that time control of the House and Senate?

George W. Bush and his allies misspent more money from the public treasury than any other presidential administration in modern American history. Thus far the fiscal practices of Barack Obama have not been intrinsically different or substantially more wasteful than those of his predecessor. And it could be readily argued that Bush and his Republican colleagues certainly paved the way for whatever Obama will be doing for the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

And lemme tell you why.

Because as much as it does bother me to see those who have expressed outrage at President Obama’s health care plans being labeled as an “angry mob” by officials and now being officially targeted by what can only be called Obama’s own army of brownshirts…

…I have to remember that much the same thing was happening during the previous eight years during George W. Bush’s tenure, what with “free speech zones” and loyalty oaths and people getting arrested for showing dissent… and sometimes arrested for no clear reason at all.

Hell, I was threatened with physical violence by one of Bush’s thugs before he was President, just because I was a reporter with an independent newspaper (i.e. outside the grasp of Bush’s control-freak nature).

I remember all too well telling Bush supporters what kind of a man he really was, and how the way he ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Barack Obama’s public approval ratings are plummeting through the floor.

His opponents are crowing about how Obama is now officially not as bad as George W. Bush was.

But let’s call it for what this really means…

All this seriously demonstrates, unequivocally, is that twice in a row we have had Presidents of the United States who were/are so bad that they suck donkeys balls to no end....

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This morning, former Border Patrol agents Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos were freed from the federal prisons they had been in, and rejoined their families.

About time. But then, their imprisonment was a travesty of justice from the beginning. Regardless of their sentences being commuted, a whole lot of people in this country will never forgive George W. Bush and his lackey Johnny Sutton for taking sides with a known drug smuggler against two men who were trying to protect their country’s safety and sovereignty.

No, I won’t be one to forgive Bush for that, either.

That said: it’s good that Ramos and Compean are back home....

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Even though he has pledged to end outright torture (no matter what its supporters have tried to brand it as), is closing the CIA secret prisons and has vowed to empty the camp at Guantanamo Bay, President Barack Obama is going to continue the policy of “foreign renditions” started by his predecessor George W. Bush.

Rendition means that the United States can secretly abduct a “suspect”, and have him or her covertly transferred to another country that doesn’t have the same official policies against torture. But it’s not the United States that will be doing the torture or whatever, see? Officially, our government gets to keep its hands clean.

Some will call that “plausible deniability”. I call it “using the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law” at its most grandiose.

Still waiting for that “change” that I was hearing so much about…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

A few months ago George W. Bush proposed wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of our money and it was called “bailout” and some politicians approved it. Today Barack Obama is proposing wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of our money and it’s being called “stimulus” and those same politicians deride it as unacceptable.

I would like to quote “Oceania is at war with Eurasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” to the Powers That Be, but sad to say, they most likely wouldn’t get it.

And now that he’s President, doesn’t Obama have better things to do than to get into the proverbial “pissing contest” with a radio commentator who is nothing more than a shameless shill for the “other side”?

Don’t we have better things to do than to even care about such a non-story involving two men with apparently arrested development?

Pat Buchanan is right: ...

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President Obama plans to uphold the power that George W. Bush asserted in regards to spying on Americans without a warrant.

So much for not sacrificing our ideals for safety that Obama kept talking about this past week after he got sworn into office.

I hate to say “I told you so” but… many people, including myself, were screaming as loud as we could during the past several years that the horrible precedents that Bush was setting, would likely come back to haunt us. For almost eight years, Bush got away with violating the Constitution – in both rule and spirit – and his cheerleaders kept assuring us that Bush “had no choice” but to do these things to keep us secure.

Now those same powers have gone to a man that many of these same people have not been able to hide their sheer hatred toward. And however it ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Sic transit gloria mundi”
...

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Chris Knight's avatar

On his last full day as President of the United States (thank God), George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

And even with this, the worst President in American history managed to completely screw it up.

The sentences of Ramos and Compean have been commuted: the two former Border Patrol agents have not received full pardon. And it is nothing less than a pardon which Ramos and Compean deserve for doing their jobs as best they could. The fact remains that each of the two has a conviction on his record that will follow them after release from prison. And speaking of which, their release isn’t immediate anyway: Bush made it so they couldn’t see freedom until March 20th.

And they wouldn’t have received a commutation of their sentences anyway had it been left to the “conscience” of Bush. Millions of people and ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

With a 22 percent approval rating – the lowest ever since the Gallup Organization first started asking the question more than seventy years ago – George W. Bush leaves office as the least popular President in modern history.

Comparatively, both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton left with their approval ratings at 68 percent. George Bush Sr.’s was 54 percent. Jimmy Carter had 44 percent and Harry Truman had 32 percent, the previous all-time low.

(Incidentally, I’m seeing many of the few remaining supporters that Bush has demanding that “their guy” be judged by history as favorably as Truman has been. But I don’t see that happening. Truman holds the title of the real “Decider”, whereas posterity will note that Bush had no appreciable principle at all.)

Well, it can’t be said that Bush doesn’t deserve such outrageously low approval. He has nearly single-handedly destroyed the underpinnings of America, doing ...

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